How to Increase Brand Awareness Through Content Marketing

March 31st 2022 | By Sarah McInerney

If you are looking to boost your online organic traffic, and create brand awareness, a content marketing campaign will go a long way to helping you achieve both. But there’s a lot more to content marketing than creating and posting great material. Here we explore the steps involved in getting your message out to the masses, so that your brand can gain the recognition it deserves, all the while driving organic traffic to your website.

What are the hidden powers of content marketing?

Content marketing has a dual purpose, enhancing brand recognition and boosting organic web traffic.

In terms of boosting brand awareness, content marketing can:

• Build your social media following
• Create fruitful brand partnerships
• Improve brand loyalty and customer retention

And when it comes to SEO, content marketing will:

• Help you earn high authority backlinks to your site
• Generate referral traffic
• Improve organic ranking

But how to create a content marketing strategy that achieves all of the above?

5 key steps to building a content marketing strategy that really works for your brand

Achieving success with your content marketing campaign is all about good planning. So, before you get started with your writing, be sure to follow these steps.

1. Determine your target audience

If you fail to determine your ideal target audience, you could end up producing the wrong sort of content and promoting it through inappropriate channels. And what a waste of time that would be!

That’s why market research is such an important step, and it’s pretty easy these days to gauge interest in your brand without too much effort.

Google Forms for example is a powerful way to get answers to burning questions, such as the top pain points your brand can resolve, what’s on the market that’s similar to your product or service and what it’s missing, and what people are really looking for in terms of solutions to their issues.

Once you’ve created your survey, it’s a breeze to share to specific people or to a broad audience by embedding forms on your website or sharing via Currents, Facebook or Twitter.

2. Define your unique selling points

If you read our post about planning a successful website strategy, you’ll be familiar with this step.

What you’re looking to achieve here is a reason why people should buy your product or service, rather than a competitor’s. You need to communicate value to your target audience, so that they can instantly see why they need you. It’s all about qualifying any statements you make, with a ‘because’. So whatever you come up with that you feel is a good way to describe your offering, tag a ‘because’ onto the end of it.

For example, Figment is an SEO agency that gets businesses to the top of Google. Fair enough, but it’s a general statement that any SEO agency can make. Now let’s add a ‘because’.

Companies use Figment for SEO because we have a unique blend of skills that allow us to tailor make fully managed campaigns that are statistically proven to get them top Google rankings and enhanced organic traffic, which in turn increases sales.

It’s all about setting yourself apart and making it clear why your audience should choose you over someone else.

3. Carry out keyword research

Keyword research is a vital element of any successful content marketing strategy. Without knowing what keywords to target, you won’t be able to create content that gets found by your defined audience.

You’ll need to look at the words and phrases that are being used to find what you sell, and how they fit with search intent, but there is more to it than that. It’s crucial that you make sure your keywords are right for your audience, as well as making sure you have a reasonable chance of actually ranking for them.

Our guide to keyword research provides tips on how to approach the task, as well as listing some of the top keyword research tools.

Keyword research is a vital element of any successful content marketing strategy.

4. Create information-rich, non-branded content

And now for the fun part, writing your content! What you’re looking to achieve here is material that gets found by people who don’t necessarily know your brand, but who have an issue or need that your product or service can address. Now you know why your keyword research was so important!

Your content needs to be information-rich and non-promotional. Ideally, it will be thought-leading too, so that it stands out as something unique, rather than recycled material that’s popping up everywhere.

If you make the mistake of churning out content that doesn’t say anything new, or material that doesn’t do much other than talk about your products or services, it’s unlikely to be shared. And sharing is most certainly one of your main aims with content marketing, because that’s the way brands are built. And the more content is shared, the better reputation it will get with Google.

By the way… content doesn’t just mean written material. It can – and should also be – video, infographics, images, social media stories… whatever your audience engages with, indulge them!

5. Promote your content

There’s little point writing a masterpiece if you’re going to keep it to yourself. Simply posting your content on your website isn’t enough. You need to get it out there, and there are many ways you can do this:

• Share your content to your social media channels using relevant hashtags
• Publish content to third party websites via guest posting
• Distribute your content to an email marketing list, this can be your own, or you can pay to be included in third party mailings that are relevant to your audience
• Create downloadable guides that can be promoted across your home page or on third party sites
• Invite contributors who already have a strong following to provide content for your site, which they’ll then share to their own audience
• Use paid advertising to push your content out to a defined, relevant demographic, for example Facebook boosted posts and LinkedIn sponsored posts.

Whatever you do, don’t hold back in getting your content out to the masses. Otherwise there’s little point in producing it!

Need help with content marketing?

Content marketing forms a crucial part of our managed SEO campaigns here at Figment. If you’d like to explore how this powerful online marketing strategy could enhance your brand awareness and drive organic traffic to help grow your business, please get in touch.